and spray paint under a briidge?
setsuko,
don’t live,
as you still,
a third later then your middle golden,
ruing the former in the unwinding into grey
token or emblem the same,
with such a supplicant reticence,
you.
reality parsed into the warm
haze of your
reclusion,
your beauty,
thing of beauty.
you a beauty,
recluse,
here,
watching your occidental nose,
your gestural simplicity
like a gentle wash of
implacable density
and wishing you well.
“Gee Up”- Kindness
My kudos go to Erina Kim for whisking me away from a tearful cup of noodles and into a piping hot plate of prawn (fancy shrimp) biryani and an introduction to Kindness today. Kind indeed. This bassline is some kind of infectious ohohoho
my eyes are not foreign to the language of your truth,
they roll themselves into its gloss, seeking
sight-deep submersion
unaccustomed yet, to the pervasive seep,
from syntax to semantics.
lines to hues.
the penetration of your words is unnerving,
transgressing sensory recollections,
confounding my simplistic lineations.
proving continually,
that there’s no believing in seeing.
Easing,
Teaching me the comfort and confidence in grey scales,
grey matter wracked with the frittering contingencies,
early implanted in me, your say like blood bringing breathe to
my asphyxiated anticipations.
I stand at the cusp of my sight and belief,
struggling to recognize a reality that beckons
from within but not yet with out me.
Stating its self surely without me and my recognition,
your invitation
is so elementarily appealing, believing so elementally difficult.
Peel
me from my fallacies.
I long to be coherent.
ahhhh, sometimes I wish I could live in this movie
I punctuate my crisises in plodding. periods.
you gather them and fashion tiny…
ellipses…
My, gathered, theses,
Your steady certainty,
I. speak of ends,
,and you reach me to infinity…
We are real in the making, the holeness of hesistation no more:
Fishing apples from plains,
Pressing lines under lashes,
Pulling out a face.
Your building is excavation- motion shot through former stasis.
wavering, I see the ekphrasis in your words towards me.
stuttering towards synecdoche and I become your own.
byunuhnuhnuhnyooarowndthewe-erldurounduwe-erl-dnuhnuhnuherowndehwe-erld
This morning I turned, by prompting, to Kim Walker Smith’s “I asked you for life,” and was promptly struck.
“I asked You for life, and You sent your son to die for me.
I asked You for hope, You came in the night and gave me a dream.
I asked You for freedom, You broke every chain and gave me the keys.
I asked You for love never-ending and every day You surround me
Praise spills from my lips, flowing onto the feet of You, my King.
You deserve all the love and all the honor that I can bring!
Here is my song, here is my heart, here is my love, all for You, Jesus!
Holy, Holy, only You are worthy!”
I have spent a many a year operating along a spectrum of appraisal: fearing pride, and therefore locating myself “modestly” along the safe median of mediocrity. But this axis, I have come to see, is neither fun nor sustainable, nor intentioned, but rather, bologna or false, or crap, or bondage, etcetera. God’s purpose and identity over your life is much better.
Jesus began to vanquish my deep inklings of false humility, challenging me to see myself differently, and I resisted at first. I was keeping my writing in journals, tucking songs behind shower curtains and computer folders, thinking that focusing on them would be futile or prideful because I had neither the gifts nor the “call” to share them.
But God’s “call” to all His kids is to give Him everything that we have in praise, “spilling from our lips, flowing onto His feet.”
I was holding myself back from myself, and most importantly, I was holding back praise that was due to my King. And that felt really suffocating.
My praise, I’ve come to see, is not a selfish act of self-actualization, but a gift that is very much due to the God who put it in me in the first place. If our praise is a weapon, than wield it we must! Can you imagine a knight staring plaintively at his sword on the battlefield, refusing to swing because he does not think that it is sharp enough, or that using it would be selfishly glorifying himself? Silly.
He is more concerned about furthering His kingdom than anything, and he will use all that he is armed with (and we are armed abundantly by a good King) to do so.
And Jesus most graciously trained me! He eased me out of a most paralyzing fear to sing in front of people, and gave me gooood friends to play with me in front of a whole house of people at a Christmas party. He pushed me gently onto the slam poetry stage and freed me from the fear of the scorecard. And in doing so, He gave me more reason to praise Him.
